Cael woke me up early, again, and wouldn't let me go back to sleep, so I predict there's a nap in my future. A little bit before I got up to feed him, though, I did swap my digimons around without issue, so now Digimon 1 is back in my watch in in-training1 form and Digimon 2 is on my phone in rookie form. I sent him on an adventure, so he'll be doing that for 12 hours.
I did discover last night while looking around for some information that Bandai Namco either has recently (as of end of last year) or is currently in the process of, completely abandoning the Vital Bracelet toy line, which is kind of hilarious timing. They at least updated the app to store information on your phone instead of their servers, so it's still mostly usable, and there is an active fan project to recreate and improve the original app. DIMs might get hard to get in the near future, but I know there is also an active pirating/modding scene for those, so possibly that's a viable option.
There's a lot of talk about why they'd give up on the product, aside from that just being a thing that Bandai Namco does (talk to tamagotchi fans about that, they'll have a lot to say) but in my opinion? It's just a super niche product. It's very, very, very a toy and not going to appeal to adults both in content and quality. Meanwhile kids have never been super into games that try to trick them into exercising, and the gamification on the whole is pretty lacking -- when I was a kid I frankly wouldn't have enjoyed it despite being very into digital pets and digimon in specific. Meanwhile I don't think digimon as a franchise is very popular, though there are non-digimon vital bracelet tie-ins (Ultraman, for example) and I don't know how popular any of those are. But yeah -- it just doesn't have a market aside from specifically adults who are into digimon, likely for nostalgia. It could have succeeded, I think, if they'd put more money into it -- an actual smartwatch-like device that just talks to my phone and has actual biometric data? Or if it were just an app that talked to someone else's smartwatch3? If it had more digital pet features (feeding, petting, a couple of minigames)? I think that would be a hit. It still wouldn't rival Pokemon Go but it would be up there.
Anyway! When I finally got up to feed Cael I also did the four training options for the little man in my watch -- it has four exercises to choose from that you do for 20-30 seconds to raise one of four attributes: Squats to raise PP, Crunches to raise HP, Punch for Attack Damage, and Dash for Attack Accuracy. I do cheat a little on the crunches because I hate exercises that make me lie down to do them and consistently will just avoid exercising entirely unless I compromise with myself. And then I sat down to eat breakfast.
Speaking of compromising with myself, due to Winter Blues™ I am focusing on One Thing to improve the state of my me. First that was getting food sorted, and I did that, so now my One Thing is getting active and exercising again, especially regular PT exercises. The digimon thing is obviously going to help with that, though I'll need to watch for the novelty wearing off. But if I can get back into the habit of daily walks before that happens, that'll be good. That being my One Thing, I'm not particularly planning on anything else today, just going to do whatever and let whatever happens happen, so long as whatever happens includes getting up and moving around occasionally, taking a ten minute walk, and doing PT before I go to bed.
1For those of us who didn't grow up paying attention to digimon like Erika and I did: digimon change forms when they level up in this order: egg -> baby2 -> in-training -> rookie -> champion -> ultimate -> mega. And then there are special digivolutions where you do things like fuse two digimon together, but we won't go into that here.
2There are some different translation attempts -- for example sometimes baby is called baby 1 and in-training is called baby 2? And ultimate is sometimes perfect and mega is sometimes ultimate. I have gone almost entirely with the American version I remember for the stages, with the exception of baby instead of "fresh"
3By which I mean like, an apple or google brand smartwatch, not like if my phone was talking to ash's smartwatch to store a digimon on it
about how I'm going to drain it, but I'll figure something out and at least it being in a room with a drain in the floor means that it will be less onerous trying to get the water somewhere that isn't in my bedroom.